zoogs

Be not troubled, friend. It's not you, it's the general way we talk down about...say, soap, etc. Things we have no interest in. And the *contrasting* , much more nuanced and much less begrudging way we talk about other things we have no interest in, like wrestling. Like, there's obvious differences in how this goes:

"You may think wrestling is stupid but you have to admit wrestlers are really talented, not just in wrestling but also in other areas, and now let's extol all their admirable qualities in contrast to the soap actors, whom we can agree are the ones that have no talent. I mean, fine, obviously they do have some talent, but you know."

We can make the "in fairness, I really appreciate ____ for ____" case without simultaneously making a putdown that both isn't merited and which we don't even seriously mean. All I'm saying. It's unrelated to all your wrestler talk, but this is my unpopular little hill to die on here.

@RedDenver, hey, that's another good one! I mean, I think we should just accept that we're all nerds. D&D nerds. Fantasy sports nerds. Following real sports teams nerds. Wrestling nerds. Soap nerds. Anime nerds. Gun nerds? It's all good. We have our things that we're really into and they're different. The sports/war related ones are not any better than, I dunno, cartoon or comics or romance movies based ones.

I was really into fantasy for a while, but I've found life much better without it. There was a time when I could tell you the names of about 30 starting RBs in the NFL. And a good number of their backups. 

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Calling the AR anything other than a semi auto is inaccurate really

"I didn't say I opposed the assault weapons ban, but the AR-15 types must not be included because that would be inaccurate".

The picture grows clearer.

"I support a renewed assault weapons ban, I just think assault weapons are a made up noncategory and we're fine because assault RIFLES are illegal already."

Help us out here.

Goodness. No. You took an unprompted swipe at a lot of people -- including people who do really enjoy soaps, for example -- and I think that's unfair. How do you manage to still be the victim in this? Anyway.

It's great that wrestlers have athletic talent, but I'm really not a fan of how we all as a culture tend to put (particularly male) athletic prowess on a pedestal above other things, many of which happen to be interest areas more dominated by women than by men*. It's a sports board so I don't know if that's going to be a popular opinion here, but it is mine.

*For example, romance novels. I'm 100% guilty of dragging this and people interested in it, for sure. I can also name several dozen characters in several different comic book universes.

No assault weapons ban has ever been discussed with the kind of ludicrous, strawman classification framework you are pretending is being proposed.

Soap actors have talent. Athletic talent isn't the only kind worthy of reverence.

^False, and misleading.

We can, have, and can again define it in legal frameworks.

Spare me the hurt feelings. You come into every policy debate bagging on people who care and claiming your disinterest is better. Of all the things there are to care about, the one thing you do is making sure the assault weapons ban never resurfaces? Hell of a list of priorities, dude.

So, I’d ask you this. Why are they not just all hunting rifles, then? Could it be they /want/ to have the same form factor as the rifles used by soldiers? Why do they not have limited or internal magazines as hunting rifles at least historically seem to typically have? Could it be because they are — mechanically and functionally — designed for speed, the ability to lay down fire quickly and change magazines quickly, so as to, functionally, render you a more effective combatant? What’s the problem with making this type of thing illegal (again)? Why is it so gd precious?

Yours is a made up side of the argument. Please stop trying to say assault baseball bats is a conversation we are or should be having. “The other side” has an extant legal framework — the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, the revival in 2012 and 2013, etc.

Please understand that I am not impressed with your extremely basic expertise of guns, nor your perception that you’re here to bless the rest of us with your knowledge. What you are advocating for — we know what it is, we know they’re not M16s, and we disagree.

I don’t think “An AR-15 style assault rifle is mechanically and functionally identical to a wooden hunting rifle” sounds like an honest statement. Apart from its lack of selective fire, it seems like the whole point is to be mechanically and functionally similar to, well, a military assault rifle.

Not a thing: assault baseball bats

Actually a thing: assault weapons, which are guns

Stop trying to obfuscate the conversation, Redux. It’s intentionally misleading, and very plainly in bad faith.

Dumb joke, sorry. Don’t worry about it. You said “asston”. Sometimes I’m 12

IDK if you're serious about that, Landlord, and you don't have to say -- but if you are, I'm really shocked! 

knapplc. You do mean "of alcohol", right? 

1 hour ago, Redux said:

Assault rifles are not legal

Are we really trying to split hairs between "assault rifle" and "assault weapon" here? Like the amendment to ban assault weapons that was voted out of a FL state legislature bill to ban bump stocks?

Like the assault rifles that Dick's just announced they would stop selling, which is good, because they are illegal? Sorry -- assault-style, which is also good, because those are imaginary?

Like the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (are "semiautomatic assault weapons" real enough for you?) which expired in 2004, has never been renewed, and efforts to pass a new one similar in kind were defeated by Republicans in 2012 and 2013? 

If you're going to argue that this distinction is meaningful -- and sure, maybe it is --  then you cannot simultaneously assert that "assault weapon" is not a real thing. People are not confused that AK-74s or M-16s or other full-auto rifles and machine guns can be purchased. In fact there seems to be good, general literacy that we are talking about semiauto weapons like the AR-15. 

What does that cover? 

I'm OK with advocacy groups using money for political causes. This doesn't mean everything advocated is good. Some things are, some things are not. But consider literally anything and you will find some organized lobbying group.

And the other problem I think is power imbalance. 

IMO, an absence of Trump fans anywhere is a wonderful thing.

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So, let's say we pass a ban on AR-15s.  How do you specifically expect that to be enforced?  Do we offer a buy back and pay the value of each gun to get a lot off the street?  Then what?

I'm thinking of the Australian model here, where there was a buyback program but also a new requirement that you had to register your weapons (and I think also obtain a license). If you failed that in a timely manner you would be subject to penalties. And this was for guns, period.

What it accomplished was a large reduction in number.

JMO, but "I'm not very concerned about the constitutional rights" of people who have committed no crime and cannot be tried and convicted of murder or even intent to murder is a far scarier thought than "guns are really bad."

There is not a low risk gun. There are lower price-to-pay guns in the sense that they're not extended mag assault rifles, maybe (cue the "you guys have the AR-15 all wrong" folks, who maybe are right!) ... but gun violence doesn't take a big scary weapon. To ameliorate gun violence, we need to get at the source, and get to a place where there are fewer guns. Your house is a much lower risk place to be when there is not an AR-15 lying on the ground. Our world is a much safer place to be when there are not many guns lying around many places.

Granted, I will admit that if we banned all people, gun violence would also stop. But you won’t find everyone. And suppose you did — the extremely malevolent, murderous, committed to criminality types. Great, they’ve lost their nominal rights protections and can’t buy a gun. That’s going to stop them when the gun population abounds?

27 minutes ago, Moiraine said:

People don't talk like this. And they don't generally have too many women to count over a 2-3 week period coming up to them talking about their liberal husbands divorcing them over their feminism and crying out "we have 3 children!"

 

The entire tone was overdramatic. It read like satire.

To address this specifically, I would point out the following:

- there is one mention of divorce, and one separate mention of a called-off engagement. 

- the latter "wrote" to her. It seems possible she sought out people in her circles to share their experiences on a topic of concern to her. This is an obvious way many related things might happen in a short amount of time.

- the "many"-ness applies specifically to "disruption" in relationships due to political fallout, which is hardly unbelievable.

To turn to more journalistic articles that point to the same topic of concern as an extant trend:

- http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/fights-over-trump-drive-couples-especially-millennials-to-split-up/article/2622400

- https://www.bustle.com/p/fights-over-trump-are-leading-to-breakups-divorces-especially-among-millennial-couples-56701

- http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-presidency-destroying-marriages-country-article-1.3386982

(I haven't read any of the above in detail, to be fair. It's more that I felt some of the same things this author did and that's why I came to post it; it's not that I am trying to convince you guys that this is a thing that is happening and we should treat it as important)

AFAIK it's a personal essay; I haven't dug deeply. I added the caveat to address your unsubstantiated suspicion that it is inappropriately unattributed fiction.

I don't think the author trivializes the issue (a familiar sort of complaint) or hurts her cause (even more familiar). It is not the fault of women that they are not taken seriously, it's certainly not incumbent on women to rectify this, and in my view, the greater damage to the cause is the over-policing -- in some cases, self-policing -- of voices, as if anything less than the perfect words and the perfect medium and the perfect tactics should be repudiated and disclaimed. Sometimes an essay is just a raw expression of feeling -- no conclusion, no call to action. It need not be strategically effective or valuable, although I did find it to be these things, personally.

On the merits of the prose, incidentally, I shan't be convinced that this was not one of the most perfect description of our ridiculous Pres. ever to be circulated  

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one man, miles east, in orange, his appendages beating furiously, his colors outlandish and embarrassing

It's a personal essay, right? Or maybe it's a short story. Either way, she's translating personal experiences so as to share and convey them to a broader audience who may not have had the same ones. Isn't that what the medium is for? This isn't meant to be journalistic, clearly. 

I cringed, too. It should be discomfiting. I feel like "bad writing" is too easy a way to dismiss it, and it calls to mind all the similar ways we try to undermine the message of other storytellers. 

#MeToo as well as what came before hasn't been what you would call a mild movement. I think in finding a permissive space for their voices a lot of anger that's been held back for a long time has been let loose, and with it comes these familiar, diminishing criticisms. And yet it is the anger that holds the reasonable ground, not the side surprised to see it exist and struggling to accept it as valid.

As women are wont to do, she's probably both hysterical and fabricating.

I have a very different take. And it tracks with my impressions of men in general -- not all, but a portion, and across the political spectrum -- in the ways in which they profoundly struggle to grapple with what feels like an upended world. 

This captures many of my feelings and frustrations so resonantly. 

"This, it seems to me, is a much larger, systematic response to female voices, female interpretations, female worries and frustrations."

Also, to touch a little more on the mental illness question, I just do not believe it even addresses the problem. As long as we are a free society without Minority Report technology, or some absurd police state of the kind Trump is proposing (find the mentally ill people early! lock them up! j...f'n...c ), there's going to be some person who is by all possible accounts OK, and then one day they snap and commit a crime, and we come to understand that they've been troubled for a while. Or maybe it was even spontaneous, snapping under the culmination of pressures kept at bay for a time.

A good way of framing this that I heard comes from ... I think it was Pod Save America, but it may have been The Weeds. We point to this shooter and say, he's a troubled kid. Well, there are "troubled kids" in every city and town in the country. The next shooter, and there obviously will be one, is probably going to be someone who slipped more under the radar. Like the last shooter. The problem is the ready access to guns.